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José Lévy and Deepika Jindal, Creative Director of Arttd'inox on Playful Playfood, an Immersive Art in Stainless Steel Collection
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 6 hours ago
- 3 min read
Stainless steel has always carried a certain industrial certainty about it, the kind of material that belongs to kitchens and infrastructure and functional spaces that do not ask to be looked at twice, and it is exactly that assumption that the Playful Playfood collection by Arttd'inox and Paris-based artist-designer José Lévy arrived to dismantle at The Clearing House in Ballard Estate, Mumbai, on the 7th of April 2026, presenting instead a surreal Indian banquet where the most ordinary contents of a kitchen became something closer to theater.
For most people, a tomato or a garlic pod triggers an immediate association with food, with pasta or curry or whatever the day calls for, but José Lévy and Deepika Jindal, Creative Director of Arttd'inox, have always seen those same objects differently, and Playful Playfood is perhaps the clearest expression yet of what happens when that difference in perception is given full creative license and a high-gloss stainless steel surface to work with. Walking into the exhibition, a stack of tomato vases commands the center of the room and holds it completely, made from hyper-reflective stainless steel that behaves like a mirror, distorting and shifting as you move past so that the piece refuses to look the same way twice or to stay still long enough to be reduced to a single reading.
The collection moves well beyond the salad bowl from there into gleaming eggplants, garlic pods, and peanuts reimagined with a heavy-metal precision that sits alongside more abstract creations, including elephant candleholders and lamps whose surfaces mimic the rugged texture of tree bark, all of it shaped by a Franco-Japanese sensibility that is clean and poetic and fluid but filtered unmistakably through a vibrant Indian lens, producing objects that feel paradoxically heavy and weightless at once, as though the metal itself is breathing. Lévy has spoken about being drawn into the exuberant world of Indian hospitality and that particular cultural generosity that comes with it and about wanting to explore what happens when the soft organic curve of a vegetable is held inside the rigid, cold brilliance of steel, a tension that turns out to be luminous and strange, familiar enough to recognize and surprising enough that you feel as if you are seeing the object's true form for the first time.
For Deepika Jindal, the collaboration was always about more than producing beautiful objects; it was about reframing how stainless steel is understood and valued in India, where the material is omnipresent but almost always in the shape of a reliable, unglamorous tiffin or thali, and where its potential as a surface as precious as marble or as expressive as an artist's canvas has gone largely unexplored. That philosophy, which runs through everything Arttd'inox makes, treats steel not as a utilitarian given but as a canvas, a bridge between the soul of Indian craftsmanship and global modernism, and Playful Playfood pushes that argument as far as it has gone yet, into a collectible design language where material intelligence, craftsmanship, and a sustained artistic vision all point in the same direction and where the best home decor inspiration turns out to have been sitting in the vegetable basket all along.
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